Tackling the year in punk is no easy feat, so we gathered some of our most reliable crate-digging, tape-mailordering punk writers and asked them to offer up and discuss their favorite songs, 7″s and cassettes of 2014. Lorena Caiazzo is a Chicago-based writer, J.R. Nelson authors the Gossip Wolf column for Chicago Reader, Jes Skolnik is a writer and co-founder of Pure Joy all-ages space, Layla Gibbon is a sometimes columnist for Maximum Rock n’ Roll. These are some of their choicest cuts from the year that was. In no particular order:
Lil Tits “Peaking”
Lorena Caiazzo: Karissa Talanian, drummer for Lil Tits, has been everywhere this year. Her Chicago-based label Eye Vybe Records hosts an annual two-day psych festival as well as releasing albums on less-loved formats like tape and flexidisc. She’s got more projects going on than I can possibly list here, but her three piece punk band Lil Tits has been cropping up on more and more bills. The shifty, sloppy, stick-n-poke covered, controlled meltdowns of their live shows has been refined into something more energetic and driving on this song, which is as evocative of a drug trip as the title: a foreboding introduction building into an unrestrained, wild peak.
J.R. Nelson: Oh man, do I love Lil Tits! That new tape is a burner! Total support. Since Karissa joined in September they seem even more likely to turn the entire world into a rat mansion.
Jes Skolnik: There is no better queasy, party-death vehicle out there right now.
JRN: After releasing a 7-inch of feverish Cro-Mag-netic frenzy on Jade Tree in 2011, Philadelphia’s Leather spent a few years ripping up stages and talking smack about baking a brick-oven hot LP for the people. Naturally, they broke up before dumping the fucking thing on the world this spring. Total punk move. The entire album is a careening whiplash shit-show from stem to stern, and the vulgar pleasure of ‘New Skin’ is a highlight of cleanse-your-pores-with-Ajax® intensity. In 2022, it’ll probably open their reunion set at Chaos In Tejas.
JSS: Leather should have been one of the biggest bands in hardcore these last few years and I suspect that they’re going to be one of those bands who achieve mythic notoriety after their time. Notably, the last time Leather played in Chicago was the day that the phrase “shirtless Bobby Hill” was coined by my partner to describe the guy who knocked him over during their set. That’s when we started noticing shirtless Bobby Hills EVERYWHERE in the scene. Look next time you’re at a show. THERE’S ONE NOW.
JRN: Jes, if I ever took my shirt off at a gig (unlikely!) someone might mistake me for Boomhauer. I missed that Leather show and I’m still kicking myself for being such a dum-dum.
LC: I want a fruit pie extremely hard right now and I blame both of you.
CCTV “Mind Control”
Layla Gibbon: One of the things I like about underground music and DIY scenes in general is the feeling that there are all the bursts of energy and power happening in random locales all over the world, and the NWI scene seems to be a premium center of snot and excitement in 2014. After hearing “Mind Control” on an endlessly reblogged tumblr sprawl I spent four months trying to figure out how to get their music off the Tumblr and onto a mix tape. Luckily CCTV, blessed with an impossible to Google band name have not one, but two songs on the super sick Cool Bands 2 comp, which features other NWI luminaries we all love like Big Zit and Ooze. “Mind Control” is an icy, disdainful shudder of a song, reminiscent of the Ama-Dots, or “Too Many Creeps” and before you can figure out what’s happening it’s over, and you have to listen to it again and again.
JRN: Layla, as someone who has a permanently nervous mind, Big Zit (basically the members of Ooze switched around and rocking for light in a Bad Brains mode) are the ritalin for my punk rock ADHD. Chicago sportscasters and other hosers (like me) also refer to NWI as “The Region” and so should hardcore stans –because right now it seems like a dozen or so are bands are an instant shorthand for quality.
JSS: Fluttering bass pulses moving into jagged start-stop territory, roaring and swinging and creeling, this 49-second track distills everything that is real and true about the way punk can speak to a body without any preaching. There is no note out of place on this UK band’s debut 7” (the follow-up to a much beloved and well shared demo), remarkable for a very short three-track EP with indecipherable lyrics and a lot of noise. This whole 7” reminds me why I fell in love with this stupid scene in the first place and why I’ve stuck with it this long. It is a bolt of energy to the heart.
LG: The London feminist punk explosion is a total incendiary force and I can’t imagine how anyone listening to Good Throb or Frau would not want to immediately start a band. I would also suggest checking out Family Outing too, they broke up already of course, but they have a sick tape and cover similar territory with a more HC attack, similar territory being a group that exposes the boredom and degradation of modern end times capitalism through violent sounds and imagery. Plastic bags and cat calls, repulsive bosses and late night concrete walkways. Creating DIY culture out of the material culled from endless crappy service jobs. Yes!
In School “Apocryphal Scum”
LC: NYC’s In School never stops standing up for the queer and brown punks who are so often underrepresented in hardcore. All their anger at injustice and abuse in the scene–and the world at large–is channeled perfectly into this one track, a soaring pinnacle of rage and an absolute refusal to take any shit.
JSS: One of my current favorite hardcore bands, bar none. This track made my Best of ‘12 mix when it appeared on their demo, and as it appeared on the Conquest 7” this year, it is leaner, meaner and cleaner. If you have never seen this band live, you truly need to. They will rip your heart out through your mouth and you will love every second of it.
Raspberry Bulbs “Lionhead”
JRN: Brooklyn’s Raspberry Bulbs are the heaviest and meanest practitioners of a stomping, bare-bones hybrid of black metal and punk that skips velocity in favor of what at first seems like a basic death-rock plod. For lack of a better term, call it “The New Simplicity’—or, you know, punk rock.
JSS: Raspberry Bulbs are the sound of this culture’s perfect malaise, the penciled black cloud over your head you didn’t even notice was there because it’s been looming so long. Play this one at full volume at my funeral.
Priests “And Breeding”
JRN: Discussing “And Breeding” in an interview with Rookie earlier this year, Priests singer Katie Alice Greer couldn’t hide her disappointment that “pop icons everyone is obsessed with” aren’t “more provocative, revolutionary characters”. Ricocheting post-punk slash and burn jams like this—Greer drops one of 2014’s most essential truth bombs when she screams “Barack Obama killed something in me and I’m gonna get him for it”—seem destined to give Priests a balance of pulpits for years to come. The band’s drum-tight and thoroughly charismatic stage presence—I saw them three times this year, and their sermons never fell flat, even in a dank Chicago basement when the mic cut out for five minutes —probably won’t hurt.
LC: I saw Priests twice in Chicago this year and both times were incredibly intense. Greer stalks, stomps, and shrieks, totally owning the stage. I love how this song showcases her teasing, sing-song sass that dissolves into an abrasive, hissing chant.
JSS: Katie’s voice and presence are truly unique and instantly striking, and I’m also a really huge fan of Daniele’s drumming.
Vial “You’re Not Safe”
LG: I was at a random beach party in Orange County talking to this cool girl in a green hoodie with a Necros patch on the front, next thing I know she is playing rudimentary HC guitar in one of my favorite new bands. VIAL feels like a gang, a crew of long time friends that have been going to shows, surfing and making art together since they were teenagers. Their tape rules, and watching them play is genuinely exciting, the aesthetic and the falling apart classic concept of HC as a form of American folk music style-the front woman Krista is so powerful and charismatic it’s like you’re watching an old Target Video of some secret Mabuhey Gardens footage.
JRN:This tape was the new discovery of the roundtable for me–it sounds like the soundtrack to that giant fire in Downtown LA a few weeks ago.
Good Throb “Acid House“
JSS: The members of Good Throb are all essential players in the current London DIY scene –between them they are responsible for an enormous number of artistic projects not just limited to music. “Acid House” is the opener to my #1 LP of the year, the perfectly titled “Fuck Off” – if Delta 5 were operating in 2014, warm and human and angry instead of cold and architectural, they’d probably sound a lot like this. This is dynamic minimalism at its best, music with space and sharp contraction, wound so tightly that it never comes to a cathartic explosion – and thank goodness for that, because catharsis would bleed these songs of their gnashing ferocity and imminent presence. Start your own band and hope to be as phenomenal as this.
JRN: Good Throb spent most of the year–amazingly–giving away “Fuck Off” for free on their Bandcamp. I think I’m responsible for at least a few dozen or so downloads–I proselytized to an annoying levelfor this LP more than any other in 2014. Burn down your ‘no taste’ hometown while listening to this and rename that shit Torch City.
LC: Purely on an aesthetic level, as someone with the attention span of a gnat, I love the chunky texture in this song; how the vocals shift from sweet and clear to rasping and fuzzy, and the unexpected glow of poppy warmth at the conclusion.
Yi “Freeze“
JSS: 2013 and 2014 in punk belonged to the mutants (a trend this old freak can get behind), with Midwestern weirdos like Lumpy and the Dumpers, Ooze, Big Zit, and Coneheads producing some of the funniest, most uncompromisingly ridiculous takes on subgenres that are running low on unrehashed aesthetics. Yi, from the Bay Area, didn’t end up listed alongside these young upstarts, but they are true weirdos in the best possible way; there’s nobody else who sounds quite like them. “Freeze” starts off a poppy garage stomper that mutates into crossover thrash by way of a bridge that sounds ever so briefly like AmRep-era Helmet, and it WORKS. Their brand of weird is smart and sharp rather than sloppy and absurd (this is a band who can make a fucking flute solo work in a punk song), and truly experimental. “Crying,” the LP this appears on, was their self-released swan song, and they will be dearly missed. Yi is dead, long live Yi.
JRN: Jes, you were kind to mention Ooze here, and I hope you don’t mind if I interrupt for a sec and give a shout-out. These Northwest Indiana bozos are right next to the underwear in the top drawer of my day to day life–their song “Big Angry” starts with the sickest glam riff of the year not on the new Kix LP.
Penny Machine “Not Wrong”
LG: My favorite discovery of 2013-2014 was the effervescent Eno worshipping genius Oakland group that was Pang. They of course broke up after two fantastic 45s, that brought to mind the transcendent post-punk desperation of Magazine… Not an easy feat! Hopefully all the women involved will do new band ideas.All I know is that Candace did a solo Wire cover band for Halloween of which I am very sad I missed, and she also fronts the incredible Mansion. As for this tape? Alexa formerly of Pang is in at least fifty bands but I think this is my favorite. It’s hard to pick a favorite song, when this whole tape sounds like it coulda been recorded by a bunch of art school girls in 1979, 1986, 1993 or last summer.It’s timeless and cool, aggro and hilarious, I am imagining a bunch of women covering Suburban Lawnsand Chairs Missing at the same time.
JSS: Layla, I bought a Pang 7″ purely on your recommendation months ago and I really love it. This band is so far up my alley it’s in the kitchen rooting through the fridge. Catchy and off-kilter and unique, while it’s reminiscent of other art-school post-punk, like you said, it’s totally of its own mind and substance. I love it.
